Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor and Japanese Work Culture

Like the other major '90s-era American thriller writers who took up the then highly topical theme of Japanese-American relations Tom Clancy presumed to "explain" Japan to his American audience in Debt of Honor, retailing the clichés of the "experts," though perhaps less admiringly than others. In his account Japan's culture "demanded much of its citizens" in a way supposedly alien to even the Japanese-American character (Chet Nomura) through whose eyes Clancy showed his readers the country, with "[t]he boss . . . always right," the "good employee" the one "who did as he was told," and getting ahead requiring one to "kiss a lot of ass" and go the extra mile in regard to the display of loyalty to the employer ("sing the company song," come in "an hour early to show how sincere you were").

As is often the case with those who make much of "difference," all this was really much less "different" than Clancy made it seem--in America, too, the rules of getting ahead not so different. No more in America than anywhere else do bosses take unkindly to being wrong, and employees who do not do what they are told. And no less in America than anywhere else do "ass-kissers" get ahead, and those who refuse to play the game suffer for fighting to retain their dignity in the inherently degrading situation that is the personal subordination seen in the modern workplace.

Indeed, those familiar with what it takes to enter the more rarefied territories within the professions (like completing a prestigious medical residency), or the more prestigious firms of "Greed is good"-singing Wall Street and "Move Fast and Break Things" Silicon Valley--where many an employer is an insufferably smug idiot bully who considers themselves entitled to put anyone desirous of a position through sheer hell for the privilege of making money for them, or simply put having been an intern for their firm on their resume--will be less impressed than Clancy was by what he thought he knew about how different Japan was with regard to its exploitativeness and destructiveness of the minds and bodies of the ambitious "go-getter" that everyone is expected to take for their ideal.

Compounding the irony, this is generally to the approval of those who see things Clancy's way.